avenueyew

gothwalk  posted a quiz. It's a good reason to remember I have an account here.


Describe your style. What is your aesthetic comprised of?
If it has leaves I like it, pretty much guaranteed, swoops or spirals of flowers, leaves, fungi, interesting branches will seal it absolutely.  I am a naturecore/dryadcore woman through and through, the older I get the more I just go for it.  I still like a mashed up dark academia and art noveau style; if I was to start exploring expressing things in original art I suspect that's where it would go.  Give me lost old building with organic looking multi-paned windows, large trees and climbers, an apparently chaotic profusion of flowers and herbs that would have some secret form and meaning.  Or give me huge stoned ruins scattered across a forest clearing being gently consumed back into the landscape.   I'm absolutely druid material.  It would completely depend on who I hung around with whether I would retain some urban influences of go full feral.  I also tend to adore Chinese and Japanese nature and garden art, I admire the style, colour and attention to detail and the way the presentation of it is different enough to make me consider it differently.  I like black and green and silver.  I like chaotic seizing of moments, I like sensuous natural things, with evocative scents.  I like structural order but not front and foremost to the brain's attention, so many things are naturally wilderness (literally or metaphorically), sometimes trying to make it take an artificial shape is a personal defense mechanism.    I also like all the misunderstood critters like spiders and mice and bats and frogs.  Not wasps though, I know they're necessary but they still give me the heebie jeebies.  

What is your favourite type of weather? What do you like to do during this weather?

Not hot.  I like the transition seasons best, Spring and Autumn.  I like being out in weather that makes me feel alive but not in the 'fear that it may not continue' way.   I like to feel cool in face and feet and a breeze pulling at the strands of my hair but not attempting to whip my eyeballs out of their sockets.  Sea winds are spectacularly refreshing.  A blue sky day that has a breeze picking out the colors of flowers and all the various shades of green in summer is a blissful thing, but a blue sky day in spring or autumn feels like a miracle with no danger of oppressive heat.    Snow is an amazing thing but yeah, probably because it's rare, but I adore the stillness of a snow day.  Sparkling hoar frost mornings with startling blue skies are spectacular.  The low gathering silver mists on the bog at twilight.  I like summer rain, or indeed any rain that doesn't feel like it's making a personal attack to make you chilled through to your bones.  I have no fear of being soaked through unless I wearing jeans and have a distance to walk or it will make me cold.  I don't generally feel the cold.  I detest, with all my heart, days that make my feet swelter when I HAVE to wear shoes.  

Describe yourself in 5 words.

Mostly kind, enthusiastic, interested, patient and empathetic. 



Do you like to read? What sort of books do you read? Do you have a favourite?

One of the strangest effects of various episodes of depression has been to change me from the sort of person who would have taped cut panels of cereal boxes together to have at least the semblance of a book to read to one that actually finds it a bit hard to get started reading a book.  If I get started I will usually plough or through until it is done and enjoy ever second of it in my old manner but the getting started is problematic.  I blame twitter and the internet generally, sometimes I know I don't have "much time" so I feed my need to pour words over my eyeballs with internet quick fixes.  I definitely think I have a residual "you can't read a book unless you have a lot of time to do so and you have work (paid variety) that needs doing. Even when I don't.  I really don't get my brain.  It seems to be all or nothing.  I still like, indeed need, to read, constantly, it's just my efforts in this area tend toward the quick fix.  I will tend towards fantasy more than sci-fi, nature writing and books about medieval social and craft NOT military history. Of and fungi research now too. 

Do you like sweets? What kind do you like? Can you cook or bake? What do you fancy eating?

Sweets as in candy - Not as much as I used to, I don't even like chocolate as much as I used to, though I still adore orange chocolate.  If they're sitting in front of me I find them hard to ignore, it's not that I really even want them but a little voice goes "sugar good, mouth like sugar instant" and manages to convince me it'll be worth it.  It rarely is.   I like chocolate covered fruit and dried mango in particular.  I will eat raisins happily instead of sweets now.  There are Finnish rowan jellies I like a lot.  I do find I'm far more frequently thinking crisps would be nice.  (my gallstones vehemently disagree) I adore cake.  I adore it far too much. I dream about cake, all sorts of cake.  I don't like very heavy rich chocolate cake so that would be the safest to have around me.  My mother's pavlova is the best dessert on earth (chewy in the inside, no sugar in the cream, loads of fruit)  I love pastry things and crumbles.  I used to be a really good baker but I am overweight and I have a coeliac son and my other son only eats a small amount of things I would bake.  I used to be an excellent pastry maker and really good at both soda breads and scones.  I make *fantastic* custard in my own opinion and really good fruit tartlets.   Good at medeira mixture anything, my sponges in later years are tending towards dry (I blame not enough practice and fan ovens)   I crave cake a far bit.  I do not need cake.  The best food items in all the world are gyoza.  


Which time era do you fancy? Why?
Any, all, for different reasons.  I love what makes people tick, I would like to see the various ways and means in which that changes.  At the moment I would genuinely like to be able to see stuff from the 1920s, to see how people explored their enormously changing world.  I would like to explore the Montmartre region during the life time of Toulouse-Lautec, I would like to see old farms growing flowers for the perfume industry, I would dearly like to know what Irish medieval life was like in my home area, I would like to visit old markets, especially a spice market filled with new and exotic finds from the New World, and even before, to travel on the silk road ... loads of things.  I would be happier with a Star trek "observation level" participation though, I don't fancy my chances surviving otherwise.  I suspect I would find the needless misery of others hard to take too.   I would like to know what it was like to stand on newly laid sun warmed stones in Rome, to watch Venetian glass workers at work or medieval dyers and pigment makers, apprentices at work.   


A fact about you not many know? Do you have a hidden talent?

Hmmmm.  I don't know if there's many of these.. I tend to be pretty upfront, if I share things with you there's really not a lot I wouldn't share.  I suppose maybe that's a thing, people may think I'm more reserved than I am.  I tend to need someone to ask me a question if they'd like to know something about me because I presuppose that they would not.  If I'm asked something I will tell.  This might need to come with a safety warning mind.  If I have a hidden talent it's probably hiding from me too.  

What mythological creature would you be and why?

A dryad or a wood spirit of some sort.  I get to hang around in the woods all day watching stuff grow and animals and birds getting on with their lives and no one would expect me to fix a stupid coding error ever again.  

Are you a night owl or an early bird?

Totally a night owl.  I resent the fact the morning people got the drop on deciding what the working day was just because they were up first.  My brain comes online in the afternoon and twilight is the best part of the day.  

One thing you could spend hours discussing?

You, the person reading this.  Any person.  What makes you tick, why you do and like and tend to the things you do.  What you like and how you see the world, your impression of life the universe, sex, death, invention, necessity, philosophy, what we're really want to do and why we're doing capitalism instead, the ways in which  beech trees are different than hazels, the manner is which metal behaves in a molten state, how things I don't know about smell, how the recipe for .. well anything.. came about, what you would do if you could create a universe.  How things make you feel, how you think they make others feel, if you believe in a divine presence and what it is, how you think memory works, what your memories are to you, how you process your thoughts and feelings, if you think processing them is important or incidental, if your life is a series of experiences you just experience without comment or analysis of if the comment and analysis is important and if so how much so.  If you would live in another time or place, are you a city dweller.    I like people, I like how they're put together.  I don't want to be rude and ask unwelcome questions but you, all of you, is interesting.  


Are you afraid of the supernatural? Do you have any scary stories to tell?

No, I don't really have strong feelings about a supernatural anything.  I think there's plenty of natural stuff I need to expend energy on dealing with and if something supernatural wants me to pay it some mind I reckon it'll let me know and I will deal with it then.  I don't tend to blunder around *too* much in a way I feel would cause too much attention to fall upon me.     I remember the Friday before my brother died having an deeply uncomfortable feeling of dread that I mentioned to some work colleagues which was comforting in a weird way afterwards when I got an equally impressive feeling that things, while horrendously shit, were also broadly okay.     I also remember once driving with my ex through parts of Meath on the way to Newgrange and both of us falling silent  at the same time and then both admitting, after 15 minutes drive, that we were feeling anxious and keen to get out the area as quickly as possible.  


What makes you infuriated? Do you get upset easily?

 Fury is a weird thing, I have only really started feeling it sometimes again recently and it's been ... kind of horrible figuring out what to do with it.   I'm not sure I'm qualified to deal with this question having apparently relapsed to my teens.   At the moment I need to be very careful I'm not just venting.  But making the list are small minded, callous people with short term selfish goals.  People treating other people badly persistently.  People not making any sort of effort to sort a long term problem - it doesn't take much to convince me they're trying at all and then it's fine - but just throwing hands up and refusing to take any sort of responsibility after a long time makes me twitch.   I honestly don't know if I get mad and/or upset easily, I think I do sometimes but other days I think I am a very patient sort of person who doesn't get upset or bothered by an awful lot.  I suppose there are exercises in finding boundaries, and this has been raising some very interesting learning points for me. I have always been a very empathetic person, I found it very easy to see how the other person might feel - this becomes a problem in that you end up not being able to express any sort of personal position because you always argue yourself out of it.  I don't think it's any particular secret that a previous long term relationship I was in was..difficult.. so there were a lot of things to unlearn that took a very long time .    Getting the balance right is a constant work in progress in life I feel.   I get upset on other people's behalf and it's crippling when I know I'm at least part of the reason. 


What do you find beauty in? What is the definition of beauty?
Without going all Polyanna on it there's not much I can't find beauty in.  There are plenty of ideas out there that are downright ugly and they're getting an alarming amount of airtime.  But things tend to be lovely, the more so for me having any sort of affection for them.   I love miniature and details, I love natural, I love things people spent time and energy and enthusiasm on, I love colour, the manufacture of colour, the feel and scent and molecules of it.  I love enthusiasm.  If you love something and find it beautiful and communicate it to me I will find it beautiful too, if only because you do.  

And it came to pass that the days were accomplished that she should be much reduced of her anxieties and of her great dark malaise and it was decreed that the Great Age of Laundry should begin. 

And all went to gather laundry, every one to their own room. 

And she also went to her clothes mountain, out of the bedroom of herself, into the Utility Room which is called That Awful Place (because of the deluge of clothes) to sort washing. 

And so it was, that, while she was there, the beast of washing finally woke and set upon the mighty task. 

And there were clothes horses and radiators tasked with securing the great drying endevour and everywhere was the quite pleasant but strong smell of Persil. 

And she brought forth her first fresh-laundered clothes and there was much rejoicing.   

 I've been so bad at updating otherwise, so here's the meme everyone's been doing via gothwalk 

Go to hot drink is, and will probably always be, tea.  It's good for the soul, yo.  

What book gets you into the cosy spirit? Any book.  The act of reading in bed, on the couch with a fire, sprawled over an armchair in excellent company also reading or even on a train curled slightly in towards the window are all cosy as far as I'm concerned.   I read familiar books with strong themes of nature, food and/or magic if I want to settle myself, Austen if I want to reset my brain to deal more effectively and appreciatively with words and the flow of language, Pratchett if I want to restore my faith in people, non fiction if I am looking for the fizz or new ideas to chain to old ones.  

 Is there any food that you ate so much of, for any reason, that you now can't stand it? What about drink? 

Is this April or August?  Are the Back to School posters telling the truth?  Is this "2 weeks" lockdown going to shape up like the first 2 weeks? Does Russia really have a (n untested) vaccine when we're being told don't expect one in spring 2021.  I, in all seriousness, talked about next year's Leaving cert 2011 instead of 2021.  What the hell sort of a number is 2021 anyway?  Weren't we supposed to be better than this (sweeping arm flails indicating US news in particular)  by now?  Ugh

 I feel too tired to function, so this is likely to be .. incoherent.  I've been trying to actually just put words on screen all week though, and tiredness or work has mostly been my reason not to, so I should just get on with saying something, to show willing like.  Today was a lovely day, garden centre in Birr with gytha_uib, good sandwiches, great chat, and unrushed wandering around admiring plants and trying to resist buying All The Things. 

I made a decision this year to attempt to be Bee/Butterfly positive with my scrappy squares of mostly builders rubble, and to be nice to whatever birds were willing to adopt me.  I had been reading with some concern about the decline of sparrows (https://www.irishtimes.com/news/the-sad-decline-of-the-street-wise-sparrow-1.291870) and I'd always enjoyed their chittering, argumentative mobile parties when I was in school.  I had definitely noticed I hadn't been observing them in the last few years.  I've been thrilled to contribute seeds and water during drought to my own neighbourhood host/quarrel/ubiquityof sparrows, I can see them through my window while I work and it's been hours of entertainment.  Gardening has released a particularly savoury array of slugs and snails, and my back garden path (tarmac with a cement edging)  is proving very popular with some young thrushes.  A robin in my front garden birch tree actively encourages me to leave them to whatever my spade has uncovered.  The ants are not pleased with me, at all.   After the trip I was planting a big open daisy down behind my lavender which is constantly buzzing with armadas of bubblebees and I reached over to a spot behind a rock where there was some compost to spare and was ..surprised.. to have it squeak at me.  A small mouse(?) legged it under the box hedging as fast as its tiny feet could carry it and the panicstriken squeak, I would swear, promptly turned to righteous indignation and horrified disgust.  Trust me to upend the Karen of the the small rodent world. 

I laughed, a kid playing ball up the road a little went "what she laughing at" and was responded to with "I don't know, I hate her"  Wow, what a charmer you are, small boy I have never set eyes on in my life. (absolutely and supremely unconcerned about my own personal hater, just to be clear)  The boys, of which there were three, then went on to attempt to play some weird game of football under the van in next door's drive.  I don't know if next door know those kids any better than I do.  The entire time kid two kept telling the other two he hated them.  So not just me then.  Kids are weird.  

I ran out of steam astonishingly early, but I hope to get some more planting and clearing sorted tomorrow.   The idea is to have so many butterflies and bees about the place I can figure out ways to have them form into my own personal army   graciously allow me to take lots of cool photographs.  The ones in Blackwood rarely acquiesce to being my models.  *staples hand to forehead and sighs, dramatically* 

Tooth related misadventures sort of derailed this whole thing for a while, and I won't go into them because ugh and also ugh. Mostly done with now, bar the healing up part which is well underway.  This week was the start of "Go anywhere in Ireland" phase of lockdown release.  Forget shopping and hairdressers which apparently people are going insane about, I can now visit people outside Offaly and they can visit me.   I, for one, am extremely glad to get to this stage, no matter how much I think people are underestimating the whole Covid thing out there.  (In all seriousness I understand the Irish hospitality industry has been pummeled, and badly, but I'm not sure hiking prices to the degree they seem to have is helping them in any way whatsoever.  And this idea they seem to have that the government could make the virus respect a 1m separation if it *really* wanted to  is just weird.) 

I'm currently halfheartedly poking work related things as last week's excitement has me a bit behind where I ought to be.  Hard to be terribly enthusiastic, I have places to go and trees to visit.  Hell, I even have gardening to do which is better than death by a thousand emails of a working day, or partial working day.  I suspect it wouldn't be very many responses of "I don't care" that would get me fired, so I'll avoid that.  A wage is a useful thing.  

Easy QOTD today, since I have been remiss about those too.. What's the most expensive thing you've ever broken? 

There was a thing that went by on Reddit or Twitter recently that said something like Netflix had saved the average viewer something like 56 hours of ads over the duration of the lockdown. Now I've gone to look up whether I remember that at all right I see they were touting that the saved US average viewers over a week of ads in 2019, with Joe.ie putting the figure at about 6 days here in Ireland. Whether this is all just hand wavey numbers voodoo or not doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, I am certainly not touting it as anything remotely like gospel, but it served to make me have a bit of a think about tv consumption and advertising.

We don't use our TV as a TV anymore, we haven't for years. I never signed us up for a Sky package or anything when I bought the house, the lads used to watch the stuff for kids on RTE that they liked and other times screens were a thing there was Xbox'ing or platystation'ing or the Wii. I never really felt there was a show I could commit to being in front of my screen at a definite time every week. If ad breaks came on and I didn't get back from getting up to do something in another room or whatever it didn't really bother me for most things. The more ad breaks there were, particularly where there were lots of repetitions of the same ads, the more likely it was that I disengaged. I notice it far more now when I go to visit other people and they have a TV on for background noise and there seems to be these endless streams of sponsorship ads, ads about TV programs on the same channel and they're exactly the same line up of ads that were played 10 minutes before. I have no doubt they are effective in their way, I certainly know more about UK sofa dealers and insurance companies than I ever, ever wanted. But I hate them.

I know most people traditionally used the ad break to go make themselves some tea, or the TV was just background noise anyway. Even I can't drink as much tea as I could make in an average set of ad breaks now I think. If I watch TV I want to actually watch the TV. I dislike sharing a room with a TV that is playing while people are doing something else. I remember realising that ads were played at an increased volume in comparison to the level of the show and that it increased the feeling of fracturing.

Then along came box sets. I could watch something from beginning to end with no interruption. I discovered that for some stories this made me reach the state of concentration that I prefer and that I really, really enjoy binge watching a series that particularly grabs my attention. I presume this happened for a lot of people and the already marked shift towards providing story arcs instead of instances of a repeated episodic formula has just gotten stronger. I find it interesting, for example,that I watched a lot of ST TNG and ST DS9 but would regularly miss episodes and cames away with a much stronger and more complex idea of the Klingon related stories than my much later episode by episode, watch everything (though not binge) repeat views on Netflix revealed. I presume my brain supplied story elements the series did not. I reasonably often find I have times in my life that enable a prolonged period of watching a series - illness for example. I have thus enjoyed bursts of watching things like Stargate and the spinoffs and I found it amusing to start to pick out the formula and how the same scenery was used in different ways. Watching Hercule Poirot revealed how few Art Deco places still remain for the BBC to be able to stage things in but how amazing set designers can be at their job. I like the layers of being entertained; the story and the craft.

The best TV makes me forget about the structure and get lost in the story, and that's where I binge, where I find myself wondering at 3 am if Netflix still does the "Are you still watching" check between episodes or have I just kept clicking next episode. Sometimes Prime will jar me out of a good binge because it insists on those stupid show ads before each episode. A series that makes me want to binge properly doesn't happen often, but when they do they plug straight into my brain and I adore the lost in someone else's brain feeling.

I've been trying to identify what it is that makes something more compulsive than another and I don't think I can. Sometimes it's that I really, really need to know what happens to one or more of the plot lines. Sometimes it's because I form a theory about something and feel compelled to see if I'm right. Sometimes a character hits me just so and I can't get enough of them for a while. Sometimes it's the world or landscape the whole thing is set in. Currently I have been enthralled with The Magicians, and I'm pretty sure it's for the world more than any other element. I love that it ransacks every comfortable magical place in my reader's memory and turns me around in it to pay attention to the gorgeous and the grey and the terrible. I adored and binged Heroes (season one - a distinction I was amused to note Prime is at pains to point out) for the characters, I needed to know what happened to them. I was gutted by Season 2. Cloak and dagger poked things in my brain and I wanted to let it keep doing so, it seemed to be a useful direction to be poked in. My brain prefers to explore things in huge chunks, not tiny bite sizes. Travellers communicated a compulsive urgency that I got caught up in, I think the first season was the first time I ever watched a show all night because I couldn't stop watching it.

I was trying to think of a ranking for "must watch binge series" but the reasons for the binge likely were a product of the right conjunction of time and place, interest and my brain chemistry so I don't think I have a list like that right now, but I'll give it some thought. I probably need to spend some time remembering all the shows I actually ended up binge watching first.